As the complexity of the mobile communication network service and technology is continuously increased, and the market competition is rapidly intensified, the network maintenance gradually changes from aiming at the network equipment to aiming at service and focusing on the customer perception. The tracking function is a key technology to adapt for the management request in the view of the commercial network application technology.
The tracking tool in the mobile communication network is an assistant tool of a network management system, which plays a very important role in failure locating and daily operation and maintenance. The tracking tool has the functions of recording on spot and locating problems. Thereby, maintainers can conveniently observe the real-time calling process, and the foreground developers can conveniently locate the failures and debug the foreground programs.
The Long Term Evolution (LTE) system gives relative description of the tracking process in 36.413 and 36.423. The tracking interaction process between a Mobile Management Entity (MME) and an Evolved NodeB (eNodeB) is described in an S1 Application Protocol (S1 AP). The tracking interaction process when switching occurs among the eNodeBs is descried in an X2 Application Protocol (X2 AP).
In the above, a tracking task is sent via a trace activation information element (IE) between the network elements. The trace activation IE is described in the protocol as follows:
TABLE 1IE/GroupNamePresenceRangeIE type and referenceSemantics descriptionE-UTRANMOCTET STRING (8)The E-UTRAN Trace ID IE isTrace IDcomposed of the following: TraceReference defined in [10] (leftmost6 bits of OCTETS), and TraceRecording Session Referencedefined in [10] (last 2 bits ofOCTETS)InterfacesMBIT STRING (8)Each position in the bitmapTo Tracerepresents a eNB interface;first bit = S1-MME, second bit = X2,third bit = Uu;other bits reserved for future use.Value ‘1’ indicates ‘should betraced’.Value ‘0’ indicates ‘should not betrace’.TraceMENUMERATED(Defined in [10]depthminimum, medium, maximum,MinimumWithoutVendorSpecificExtension,MediumWithoutVendorSpecificExtension,MaximumWithoutVendorSpecificExtension, . . . )TraceMTransport Layer Address 9.2.2.1Defined in [10]CollectionEntity IPAddress
In the above, the E-UTRAN Trace ID represents a tracking task number; the E-UTRAN Trace ID has totally 8 bytes, which is equal to 6 bytes of Trace Reference plus 2 bytes of Trace Recording Session Reference. In the above, the Trace Reference is the trace reference number, and the Trace Recording Session Reference represents the reference number of different callings under one tracking task.
But the inventor finds that it can be seen from structure of the trace activation that the current message which contains the trace activation IE can only carry one tracking task. Hence, the current protocol cannot support that two or more tracking tasks need to track one user synchronously, and synchronously tracking one appointed user by multiple tasks cannot be realized. However, the condition that multiple tasks synchronously track one appointed user commonly exists, for example, synchronously opening two or more tracking tools to synchronously track one appointed user, and the like. Meanwhile, there is another problem that when the user implements X2 switching, multiple tracking tasks cannot be carried to the target cell due to the limit of trace activation. Then, the target cell cannot create the tracking task, and trace abnormality is caused.